Due Process: SWAT-Inspired Multiplayer FPS Due Attention

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I have fond memories of clearing corners in Rainbow Six and SWAT, and I’ve longed for a modern method of drawing and poorly executing plans with friends. Rainbow Six: Siege could be the game I’m looking for, or it could just as easily be Due Process. It’s a first-person multiplayer game where attackers and defenders draw on maps, draw their guns, and then blow themselves and each other up. There’s a first alpha trailer below and it contains plenty of reasons to be interested.

“ALPHA AS FUCK” as a point of bragging made me smile. Every description of the game seems keen to stress that the artwork isn’t in the game yet, but I’m actually a fan of its blocky, disintegrating men, pixellated blood smears and higher-resolution particle effects. I’d play a game that looked like this. Here’s the full blurb from the game’s site:

Due Process is a very alpha love letter to “classic” tactical shooters of yore, like SWAT and the Rainbow Six series. It’s a strictly multiplayer game that focuses on cooperation, tactics, and planning. Players have 2 minutes at the start of a round to draw up a plan John Madden-style, involving tools like flash bang grenades, night vision goggles, and wall breaching charges to coordinate the perfect assault, while defenders scheme to foil their plans. These strategies collide in a bloody gunfight that ends in the blink of an eye.

During the heyday of Half-Life modding, there seemed to be a new, experimental multiplayer game to play every week. Even those following the sound of Counter-Strike’s AK-47s were normally in someway thoughtful and new. I’ve been a little surprised that Unity hasn’t spawned a greater number of multiplayer first-person shooters. Maybe it’s happening, only slower than I expected.

After some months of internal development, Due Process’s developers Giant Enemy Crab are ready to invite more people to join the alpha development process. It’s not publicly available and they’re not charging for it, but they are looking for people to email them who are based in North America and able to play in some scheduled test sessions.

If this looks like a thing that makes you want to breach and clear, you might also want to try out Intruder.

Maybe if you surrender and survive the round, you get more XP whereas if you die you don’t get as much? And if you’re a cop, you get more XP for an arrest, and lose XP if you murder a surrendering suspect? Something like that? (This is assuming they have some sort of XP/level system, which they may very well not; I don’t think such a thing would gel well with the type of game they seem to be aiming for, honestly. But you could replace ‘XP’ with anything else which carries over between rounds…)

I suspect it’d need a fuckload of playtesting to implement that in a way that was fun and not just frustrating, though.

Or if when you shot someone you got to see that man’s family sorrowfully struggle to get by, but when they surrender you get a happy scene of the man’s children happily hugging him, seeing their daddy is safe at home.

“Hopefully for Sniper Elite V3 there’ll be an even more comprehensive kill sequence in which, after an even more explicit close-up of the bullet boring a path through some Nazi intestine, the camera hurtles to the other side of the world and shows his sweetheart’s expression as she receives a telegram announcing his death. And then it shows his crestfallen kids being told daddy won’t be home for Christmas. And then the camera follows them through their entire lives, in real-time, depicting them growing up despondent and angry and unfulfilled, and eventually all killing themselves in atrocious ways on the 50th anniversary of pop’s murder.”

You have to give the guy being arrested reasons to surrender. Maybe a one-life game mode, with the possibility of rescuing prisoners or simply being allowed to play the next round.

Problem there is you still end up with griefers, and if the same death penalties are applied to cops then you end up with cops who will just shoot first to be safe (or shoot after surrender just to grief themselves). Its similar to the issue that games like Day Z face.

They could implement handcuffing as a “shaming” tactic a la counterstrike. Players might opt for less-lethal beanbag rounds for their shotgun, or maybe equip a taser as a sidearm to incapacitate the defenders. I doubt anyone would voluntarily surrender, though they can already drop their weapon, so you’ll have to use tools like these to down the defenders and handcuff them. I’m sure we can find a way to reward the act as well.

Yeah, our levels look so basic because they are procedural! We want to keep the maps small to facilitate teamwork (bigger maps mean people tend to spread out), so if the maps weren’t procedural the game would fall into strategic equilibrium instantly.

You, I like you. Thank you.
Static maps are the worst part of every tactical shooter, because at the end of the day there is always one “best strategy” that people figure out and it just becomes that every round.

Real cops don’t visit the same house again, and they don’t have experience attacking that house ten times before. Team planning is only fun if all of you are equally as inexperienced, meaning everyone’s input is valid.

Basically this is just a long winded way to reaffirm what you already know, and to say thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Agreed. The only other game that looks like that is MINIMUM, and its just fine. Besides, if the game is all about planning and executing, then having those nice, clean, noticeable markers for everyone is perfect.

“I’ve been a little surprised that Unity hasn’t spawned a greater number of multiplayer first-person shooters”

I’m not entirely sure Unity is suited towards multiplayer first-person shooters. It seems more designed for general game design and/or prototyping. I’ve noticed that people also tend to get caught up with trying to to use Unity’s physics engine to do stuff like model bullets, only to get confused when it doesn’t behave the way that they want. And while there are Unity communities where you can ask for help, asking for things beyond basic work tends to get met with replies that you should work on simpler projects. There are plenty of people asking for advice, but few really seem to have good answers (and the addition of the Asset store turned some of those good answers into shilling for store packages. I largely stopped reading Unity game making forums after the Asset store was implemented, because people stopped talking about how to do stuff and instead switched to selling pre-made packages.)

In the end, you might be better looking at an alternative more suited to handling an FPS, but even the alternatives involve more work and knowledge than many with dreams desired.

Of course I could be entirely wrong, and a flood of Unity-based multiplayer FPS are around the corner.

I was very excited about this (and even applied for Beta signup), until I remembered that strategic PvP basically can never work…
Unlike in real-life or with AI, it is impossible to surprise a player opponent, as they will *always* know they will be attacked any second.
There’s no sneaking up on anyone, there’s no way you can burst into a room and take everyone by surprise, because the other side will constantly be on 100% alert, and try their best to be unpredictable (i.e. putting themselves into positions that don’t make sense from a realistic scenario standpoint, running around as fast as they can, having their gun raised and aimed in your general direction, etc., etc.).
With every side always being on full battle alert, all that PvP games come down to normally is who can shoot the fastest (as could even be seen in the trailer for this game).
So, I guess unless they will implement a Coop vs AI mode, it will probably not end up being very “strategic” after all…

Balderdash. Of course it’s not going to be strategic. The scale of the game is much to small for that. Instead it’s going to be tactical, and the art of tactics is that of surprising someone who expects you to try to surprise them. It is impossible to be “constantly on 100% alert” assuming a round lasts for more than a few minutes. As in most competitive shooters, situational awareness is more important than pointing and clicking. Even in Call of Duty, oft-derided around these parts for its shallowness, movement and positioning are vastly more important than simply ‘shooting the fastest’.

This game isn’t very SWAT like. No procedure, no call-ins, and most importantly, NO ARRESTS. That was the heart of what I loved about the SWAT games *and why I liked them over R6). They were one of the few (only?) FPS games where the use of deadly force was treated like the regrettable last resort that it actually is. The optimal outcome would be no one getting hurt, and no one firing a single shot (or at least a suspect dry firing on a wall, hurting no one).

As gentlemen above me have expounded, I really don’t know how to implement that in a adversarial multiplayer environment. As well, it’s a poor simulation of an actual SWAT assault, because as Kronzky above said, there is no element of surprise. SWAT assaults rely on how prepared or unprepared suspects are, and a lot hinges on their psychological state and reaction to escalating violence. That’s why SWAT games used to have details on the suspects, and it usually played into how you approached a given level.

“SWAT-inspired” is not the same thing as “Just like SWAT, including the arrests”. Mr. Smith goes out of his way to draw parallels between the two games: that doesn’t mean they’re identical in every way. If you wish to rebut his argument you must address the parallels he drew, not the ones in your own mind. I addressed the absurd element of surprise earlier, so suffice it to say that if you can’t create the element of surprise, you’ve done it wrong.